Imperial War Museums

A documentary about World War I with never-before-seen footage to commemorate the centennial of Armistice Day, and the end of the war.

In Belleau Wood, France, during the Great War, a soldier named John writes a letter home to his wife Sara in Milwaukee. He writes that her picture "helps me remember what it was like to be me." He tells her about sorties into No Man's Land, and that they have orders tonight to charge. Then, his letter becomes a report of that charge: toward an armed German soldier who doesn't fire, even when John reaches him and jumps into the trench beside him. What happens next brings silence and an end to the letter.

Eric Portman narrates this 1945 retrospective account from the RAF Film Production Unit, celebrating the RAF's role in tghe Normandy campaign, with outstanding footage of RAF Typhoons's blitzing targets with salvos of rockets and cannon fire.

Compiled from the Imperial War Museum Official Collection, this film collects rare and previously unseen film material shot by official cameramen on behalf of the RAF before the formation of the RAF Film Production Unit in September 1941. It tells the story of the RAF in the early years of the Second World War through the "phoney war", the Blitzkfreig and the Battle of Britain, capturing everyday life for those who served as wel as the RAF's frontline aircraft of the period. Other highlights include a fillmed account of a Blenheim raid on Northern France, a Sunderland flying boat sortie over Norway and Winston Churchill inspecting the new American aircraft for the RADF including the B-17, Douglas Boston and P-40.

In Electrical Gaza, Nashashibi combines her footage of Gaza, and the fixer, drivers and translator who accompanied her there, with animated scenes. She presents Gaza as a place from myth; isolated, suspended in time, difficult to access and highly charged. Commissioned by the Trustees of Imperial War Museum.

A single female voice sings of waiting in her garden for her ‘dark-eyed sailor’ to return from war, bearing the other half of their token, a gimmel ring. Three veterans pass on the road as she waits, and she asks them: “When you were fighting in distant lands, did you think of the home you left?” In reply the veterans relate their recollections. The garden images in the accompanying film represent ‘home’, but also stand for a more general possibility of redemption, of the potential of the past to return at any time, disguised and changed, to renew the present: “Each moment of time is a garden gate,” the song goes, “Through it my love may walk.”

Kay Mander kept training and social issues to the fore in the 1940s with her innovative documentaries. Mander, now living in Kirkcudbrightshire, recalls her life and work, with clips from many of her films.

75 years ago two nuclear weapons were detonated over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945. I Saw the World End is a response to those precise moments of destruction from both a British and Japanese perspective.

An impressionistic compilation of archive newsreels and interviews with the legendary film director.

The film covers the first Malayan general elections, emphasizing popular support for Tunku Abdul Rahman and the Alliance Party.